Happy Friday.
This Sunday, the Church celebrates The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity—Trinity Sunday.
The mystery of all mysteries is the Trinity itself.
The Trinity, the inner nature of God Himself, can only be known by the light of Revelation. It is only God Himself who can reveal who He is. Through the Sacred Scriptures, we come to know that God is a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We see plenty of evidence of the Trinity in Sacred Scripture from both the Old and New Testaments. Then, after Pentecost and through the Tradition of the Church, the mystery of the Trinity, while never fully understood, is gradually developed and theologically reflected upon.
This Sunday, the Church presents us with a reading from the Gospel of John:
Jesus said to his disciples:
"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me,
because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine;
for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine
and declare it to you."
The Church doctrinally teaches that “God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason."1 This means that God’s existence, even without the light of Divine Revelation, can be known with certainty.
While God can be known from reason alone, by the things He has created, the inner nature of God, or who God is, can only be known by the light of Divine Revelation.
In Sacred Scripture, we see evidence of the Trinity which is then fully revealed by Christ Himself. In the book of Genesis, we see the plural language: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). So, in the nature of God, what are the relations and the processions of the three persons of the Trinity?
The inner nature of the Trinity is itself mystery par excellence. While the complete and total nature of the Trinity cannot be known, as it is a mystery beyond human understanding, there are many things that can be known, both from Revelation itself as well as theological inquiry over the course of the Tradition of the Church.
Today, we will be inquiring into the “processions and relations” of the Divine Trinity.
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The Sunday Gospel Theology Companion
The Father
To begin, God the Father is unbegotten. He alone, in the communion of the Trinity, is sole origin. Catholic theology states that the Father alone is the single originating origin of the Trinity. Not understood in a timeline sequence as if to imply the Son and the Spirit came to be “after,” as that would imply temporality and “created-ness” in God, but rather by stating that the Father is single origin of the Trinity, it is clarifying that the Father Himself, in the One Godhead, is alone Father; the Son is not the Father.
The Son
The second Person of the Trinity is the Logos—the Son. The Son is the “only-begotten” of the Father. He proceeds from the Father as the Father’s son. Again, not in the sense of temporality, but in the sense that the Son is generated from the Father. The Council of Florence states it thus: “since the Father himself has given to his only begotten Son, in generating him, all that the Father has except being the Father, the Son himself eternally has from the Father, from whom he is eternally generated…”2
The Holy Spirit
The third Person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is “eternally from the Father and the Son, and he has his essence and his subsistent being at once from the Father and the Son, and he proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and one spiration.”3 Spiration is the theological term chosen to indicate the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Latin reads, “et unica spiratione procedit.” Spiration refers to Spirit, which aptly describes the Holy Spirit’s “breathing” forth as opposed to the “generative” begetting of the Son. It is the Father and the Son together (remember the Filioque), not separate, through which the Holy Spirit is unica spiratione procedit.
The Council of Florence and Trinitarian Theology
The Council of Florence lays out in clear terms the basics and foundation of Trinitarian theology which it has received from the Tradition, the Fathers, and the Councils. In the Bull of Union with the Copts and the Ethiopians Cantate Domino, the Council says that the Father is “principle without principle,” the Son is “principle from principle,” and “whatever the Holy Spirit is or has, he has from the Father together with the Son.”4 It then clarifies that the Father and the Son are not “two principles” of the Holy Spirit, but “one principle.”5
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The Council then quotes from St. Fulgentius of Ruspe as he says:
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